Goldberg On Cosby

Leftists, both white and black, have always warned that poor blacks would starve if government stopped "helping" them — or they'd turn to crime, riot, spontaneously combust, whatever. Personally, I've always found the notion condescending and racist that blacks would turn animal without the domesticating influence of government spoon-feeding.

Racist or not, the reverse has largely proved true. After Bill Clinton signed welfare reform, for example, poor black women didn't starve, they didn't go wilding — they got jobs. By contrast, government "help" coincided with almost unrelenting growth in family break-up and violence among low-income blacks. We can argue about how much government aid helped the black middle class, but that is irrelevant to Cosby's point. For some irreducible number of blacks, government help simply cannot solve the problem.

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Conservatives have long argued that the best thing for the black community is, in the late Pat Moynihan's celebrated (though misunderstood) phrase, a policy of "benign neglect." Most people faced with the choice of sinking or swimming will swim. And there's no reason to believe, conservatives argued, that blacks wouldn't swim like anybody else if they had to.

I'm glad to see that Bill Cosby hasn't backed down from his original statements.